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Nutjob Parade Those readers who've been following NASA's LCROSS lunar pole-prang mission, which saw a brace of spacecraft crash into the Moon's south pole earlier today, will be aware that the effort wasn't popular in all quarters.

In particular the self-styled "Chicago Surrealist Movement", claiming to speak for "surrealists, lunatics, astrologers, naturalists, anarcho-primitivists, Greens, werewolves, pagans, psychics, UFO groupies and other concerned members of the general public" launched an impassioned and beautifully written appeal to "Stop NASA Bombing the Moon!", which we enjoyed so much we reported it earlier in the week.

As a result we've had a good deal of feedback on the topic of moon assault, which we thought we'd share with you while the world waits for the results of the crater strike.

First up is commentard Bill Fresher:

The moon is a huge water balloon. If they pop it with a bomb it'll burst, the water will fall into Earth's atmosphere, heat up on entry and turn to steam, which will cook us all. Please stop NASA.

He wasn't alone, either, with various observers backing the surrealists' possible belief that NASA might inadvertently cause major havoc with their crater strike. This might seem to be impossible given the bigness of the Moon, the smallness of the LCROSS, and the laws of physics - but there were those who disagreed. Commentard Greenstar perhaps summed up this point of view best:

Think of the planets in terms of forming a sentence. The Earth is a noun. The moon is a verb. Its very existance creates action in the tides, the weather, and possibly human mood. It's perfection of rotation sets into play all the components that make it possible for life here to exist and yet no life exists there. How is that possible? Wouldn't it seem logical for the earth to have a reciprocal effect on the moon - but it doesn't. The laws of symbiosis don't apply. If the moon is nothing more than a big rock then it can be cleaved like a big rock. Laws of mass and density don't apply nor do they offer us protection from the idiots at NASA who have never watched a diamond cutter. They are big boys with BIG toys and brains the size of a TRex AND are running the risk of making us all extinct.

Many noted the traditional association of the Moon with femininity. An individual known as "Jemmifer Scott" wrote in on this subject, saying:

as a woman i feel violated that NASA feel it's acceptable to bomb the moon.

i demand this is stopped. i think we should get an INJUNCTION against NASA.

And we received another splendid outburst from one "Martha Shepperd":

these are not treehuggers just consurrned citizens. the moon is not our property yet it helps us sustain ourselves. we dont own the moon! Why aren't core tests done before blasting it? blasting the moon could send it out of orbit which would kill us. Water would evaporate before being detected anyway. Either way you have no right to jepardize my kid's fate. the core of the moon could be ice and it would crack and send asteroids to us and throw the earth out of orbit. you do NOT have the right to decide it I will take that chance!

But it was left to commentard Maty to ask the obvious question which had indeed already occurred to us at Vulture Central as well:

There are members of the concerned general public who are not werewolves, pagans or anarcho-primitives?

We here on the Reg luna-tic desk would suggest that no matter whether it finds water or not, LCROSS has been a huge success in terms of entertainment. ®